Word: important
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Rapton doesn't know how to pronounce the name of the Chinese company whose automobiles he would like to import and perhaps sell at his Honda dealership in Sacramento, Calif. He doesn't know what styles he'll promote, what he'll charge or how exactly he'll persuade Americans to buy a car made in China?one that isn't a Hot Wheels toy, that...
...together by hand?an assembly scene out of the '50s. But after his son test-drove a few models, Rapton started to think he could sell China's cars in the U.S. Setting aside doubts about Hebei's quality control, he signed a "memo of understanding" to negotiate an import deal. "It might take them a year or two to get started," he says, "but I'm willing to take my chances...
...1980s, Rink Dickinson wanted to go into business to help an unusual constituency: his vendors. He proposed to import coffee by paying impoverished Latin American farmers double the going rate for their beans. Reaction from potential investors was predictably cool. "People were just, like, 'That's a bad idea,'" he recalls. "The concept of having your values embedded in everything you did in your business ... was just not happening in any major way at all." Nonetheless, with just $100,000 from family, friends and a few supportive idealists, Equal Exchange was born...
...will have weighed in on the theme that carried the president to re-election last year: homeland security. This morning, the 9/11 Public Disclosure Project releases its progress report on American preparedness for another terrorist attack. Their diagnosis: The nation has made little headway on their recommendations of greatest import. "We may be giving grades tomorrow and I'll tell you there are more F's, unfortunately than there are A's," the former Republican New Jersey governor, Tom Keane, said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." The 9/11 group is composed of members of the 9/11 Commission...
...Japanese and South Koreans also worry about becoming dependent on imported rice. The concern is especially acute in South Korea, which suffered from widespread hunger as recently as the 1960s. In 1993, Japan was forced to import large quantities of rice when its harvest failed due to unusually cold weather. But many Japanese refused to buy it because of reports of dead rats in sacks of foreign rice and televised taste tests in which participants deemed the strange grains inedible. So shoppers stood in long lines or turned to the black market to buy local rice at outrageous prices instead...